The Green That Would Not Pick a Motive

The children were playing dragon in the south arcade before the second bell, the eldest boy with his arms spread like wings too heavy for him, the smallest girl already dead three times and delighted about it. I heard the story pass through them the way water passes through cupped hands — most of it lost, the shape of it kept. A beast the size of a house. A hunted girl the color of olive going dark at dusk. A patch of green she vanished into and did not die in. I have heard six tellings of this myth in nineteen years at this counter and never once heard the color named correctly, because the tellers always reach for the nearest word — grass, moss, shadow — and none of them has stood over a vat at the hour I stand over mine, trying to fix a green that will not agree to be one thing.

I am mixing that green today, though I did not plan it this way. Duskcap crushed into the vat — the same drowsy leaf that quiets a shaking hand, steeped now past what any healer would allow — blended with a stroke of indigo saved from a Serevan lot too pale to sell whole. The color refuses the customary settling. It holds gold at the edges in morning light and drops to something nearer black by the last bell, as though the cloth itself cannot decide whether it is hiding or sleeping. I have fought this instability for three days — fixative, patience, the small stubborn prayers a dyer says to a vat that will not be told. Today, hearing the children shriek their dragon down out of the sky for the ninth time, I understood I had been trying to cure the one part of the color that was ever true.

Because the myth itself will not decide. Did the girl hide, and the plant only happened to be there — green, indifferent, doing what green does at dusk? Or did the dragon eat of it and sleep, and her escape was not cunning but luck wearing cunning’s good coat, the way luck so often does? The market tells it both ways in the same breath and never notices the contradiction, because a child does not need the dragon’s reasons settled before she is allowed to be glad the girl lived.

I am naming the dye Dusk-and-Sleeping, and I am not fixing it. Let it hold gold in the morning and go dark by evening, the way the story does, the way the girl and the dragon share — without either one signing for it — the single color that saved them both.